Poor Bedouin who became a butcher

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was so well cast as a villain, so suited to the role of butcher, that he became more of a myth than a man. As tales of his brutality grew, the terrorist with a $25m US bounty on his head evolved into an insurgent bogeyman, plunging Iraq ever deeper into the abyss.

With events going so obviously out of control, it suited Washington and the Iraqi government in Baghdad to blame the carnage on a foreign Islamist zealot, and Zarqawi himself was a keen self-promoter, tailoring his violence for maximum media impact.

Zarqawi, believed to be in his late 30s, became a household name in Iraq, revered by supporters as a fearless and effective guerrilla leader, but reviled by others - including insurgent leaders - as a sectarian sadist. "No, we do not work with al-Qaida," said one insurgent leader, interviewed in 2004. "We have refused to work with them because they are really bloodthirsty people. They do not care if they kill honest Iraqi people. They are crazy, I tell you. They are terrorists."

A few days later Kenneth Bigley, a British engineer working in Baghdad, was kidnapped. He was later killed, probably by Zarqawi himself.

Videos

The series of carefully choreographed videos of the imprisoned Briton that were subsequently released sent the profile of the stocky Jordanian-born militant soaring. Soon, he was enemy No 1 throughout the Islamic world and the west, a status rivalled only by Osama bin Laden.

It was a remarkable odyssey for an impoverished bedouin from Zarqa, a bleak, industrial town in Jordan swollen with Palestinian refugees. The petty criminal, then known as Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, was radicalised by Muslim preachers who advocated a purist form of Sunni Islam and went to Afghanistan in 1989 to fight Soviet troops and their proxies. He returned in 1992 and a year later was arrested by Jordanian authorities for possessing guns and explosives.

Prison guards and fellow detainees recall an austere, charismatic character who studied the Qur'an and worked out. "He used to lift weights and exercise. He was seen as a disciplined, strong man. People listened to him," one guard told Reuters.

Released in 1998, Zarqawi, taking the name of his home town, returned to Afghanistan and set up a training camp before surfacing in Jordan in 2002, where attacks on US and other targets earned him the first of four death sentences in absentia.

Zarqawi was first mentioned, on the eve of the US invasion, by Colin Powell in his address to the United Nations in February 2003. The then US secretary of state said Zarqawi was a one-legged ally of Saddam Hussein with a chemical weapons network in Europe. All three statements were untrue, but Powell had propelled his adversary to the status of a jihadi star.

Rivals

In reality there was no love lost between Bin Laden and Zarqawi. The two men were fierce rivals for the No 1 slot in the global league of Islamic militants and it took months of negotiations before Zarqawi agreed to recognise the nominal authority of "the emir".

The deal did not stop the feuding. A recent video released by Zarqawi showed him firing guns and planning actions in the middle of the Iraqi plains. The contrast with Bin Laden, the white-robed sheikh in the Afghan caves far from the real killing grounds, could not have been stronger. The two men also disagreed strongly on Zarqawi's targeting of Shia Muslims. Bin Laden believes the war against the west should take precedence over fighting heresy within Islam.

Bin Laden and Zarqawi did however have a common interest in propaganda. Both knew they could do little without mass support. Zarqawi hoped to use violent attacks to incite a civil war in Iraq, to radicalise and mobilise Muslims throughout the Middle East and to force his way to the top of the jihadi militant food chain. Though relatively successful in the first of these aims, he failed in the latter two. His evident brutality and his inability to choose "legitimate" targets, repelled large sections of the potentially sympathetic Arab nation.

As the insurgency bloomed Zarqawi emerged as the ruthless, energetic commander of a small but deadly Islamist group, Tawhid al-Jihad. Its suicide bombers killed hundreds of mostly Iraqi Shia civilians. Accused of blowing up the UN headquarters in Baghdad and a Shia mosque in Najaf, among other atrocities, he sealed his notoriety in May 2004 by claiming personal responsibility for beheading the American hostage Nick Berg. Not with a sword, but a knife, all of it filmed and put on the internet. Anointed a prince by Bin Laden, Zarqawi's group was renamed al-Qaida in Iraq.

American and Iraqi officials, keen to blame Iraq's carnage on a foreign militant rather than a bungled occupation and hamfisted government, burnished the image of a terrorist mastermind.

Zarqawi relished the attention, making web postings, audio recordings, videos and pamphlets. "We promise God that the dog ... Bush will not enjoy peace of mind and that his army will not have a good life as long as our hearts are beating," he said last year. Yesterday came the final picture, a bearded man, the face cut, the eyes closed, and supporters cast Zarqawi in his final, perhaps inevitable, role: martyr.

In his own words

Sept 2004: "The mujahideen will give America a taste of the degradation you have inflicted on the Iraqi people"

Jan 20 2005: "The fruits of jihad come after much patience and a lengthy stay in the battlefield ... which could last months and years"

Jan 23 2005: "We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it"

April 29 2005: "We promise God that the dog ... Bush will not enjoy peace of mind and that his army will not have a good life as long as our hearts are beating"

April 25 2006: "America has realised today that its tanks, armies and Shia agents will not be able to end the battle with the mujahideen"

· Jason Burke is the author of Al-Qaida: The True Story of Radical Islam. His new book, The Road to Kandahar: Travels Through Conflict in the Muslim World, was published last month

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